After leading a distributed remote product team for 2 years, I want to share my challenges, and learnings. Besides that, what is the difference between distributed and remote work? And my recommendation on building a remote company.

As a founder you must be stubborn with the problem, but flexible in the solution. You must have strong opinions, loosely held. The caveat is understanding what are you solving? And focus all your energy to get it done.

As a product manager, I’m always interested in learning new mental models, improve my thinking process, and be better at problem-solving skills.

Therefore, I bought the book Think like an Engineer: by Guru Madhavan, my expectations were high because one the best books I’ve read around the subject is Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian & Tom Griffin.

I read because I think is the easiest way to get smarter and grow through someone else experience.
“Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides” - Seneca

Every year I publish my favorite books, and this year is no exception. I really enjoyed the following 5 books. And I’m really looking forward 2018, and keep these learnings through the rest of the year. I will read 40 books this 2018.

3 Pick and Choose anything you want to improve your life. From health, wealth, to knowledge.

“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”

If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.

“The big question I ask is, “When I had the opportunity did I choose courage over comfort?”

5 A Kick-Ass Guide to become the ultimate manager and leader in business. (Foundations of Product Management)

Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.”

“As a middle manager, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself….As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.”

My 1st prediction test. I do it because I think it will be interesting to see this post in 2019 and see what did happen and what didn’t.
Yesterday I reviewed my 2017 year, so I’m aiming to review the past and my view of the future. This 2018 prediction is not science // researched based, or anything like that, just high-level opinions of the subjects I’m passionate about.

If you are interested to know how an actual Superforecast should be done, you must read: SUPERFORCASTING

Here it goes:

Will the bitcoin bubble explode? I believe the cryptocurrency represents a movement, and bitcoin is just the representation of this.

I expect BTC price to continue to grow, there’s a lot of VCs, and big firms just trying to jump into the roller coaster, so prices will still go up.

I believe the actual value is on Ethereum//Blockchain; I expect technology scalability to double this year, mainly for transactions and financial purposes.

Will the Mexican Startup Ecosystem join the Crypto Movement? This is something I struggle to answer. I hope so, even my non-techie friends know about bitcoin, but the value is on Blockchain and decentralized systems, I expect more startups join the movement, but I feel it will take time for that

Will the tech power continue to be centralized? The internet oligopoly (“FANG” - Facebook Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) owns our lives in everything we do, & watch. I believe they will continue, but the industry is starting to realize this.

The Rise of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: 2018 will be the AR // VR year, iOS 11 is out, ARKIT is out, hardware and software are ready, the market is mature, Oculus Go & Magic Leap will be released in 2018.

Will Mexico improve the Fintech Law? Yes. It must.

Will UBER have a successful year? I believe it won’t, last year was crazy in the media, and competition is getting higher.

Will Mexico have a PAN//PRI President? I don’t think so, I believe it will be an independent, or a minority convincing a majority.

Will we see more gender diversity in Tech? Yes, and it must. Not only in tech but in other industries, the #MeToo campaign will continue to rise.

Will new environmental issues will come by 2018? YES. China is stopping importing recycled plastic. Plastic will be in this year’s headlines.

Will we see Trump continuing as a president at the end of this year? I hope not.

Every year I’ve written down some version of my resolutions (more on that later), but something I believe I missed was to review:

What happened in my life this year?

If you review any action, event, or experience, it can help you improve by:

Questioning yourself about better ways to do anything;

Analyzing the reasoning behind that decision, What was the context? Who are you now vs “yesterday”;

To be grateful for having another moment of breath for everything you’ve accomplished.

So this is it:

ON STARTUP // WORK

From Law 2 PM 2 Head of Product: 3 Years ago, I was a lawyer divorcing people. Last year I had the opportunity to be a Product Manager, but this year I was honored to become Head of Product at @Paybook from leading a team of 4-5, now I’m supporting over 15 people.

Idea 2 Product 2 Business: Oct 2016.- A friend tells me the “UBER for the Nightclub Industry” was an idea from a friend of his, and they needed a Product Guy. I was the 3rd to join Noble, we wrote the 1st PRD, no funding, all bootstrapped NobleApp is now live at 7+ Venues, at Wang the biggest theater in Boston, and at Royale the biggest nightclub in Boston. We launched June 2nd the iOS app and Bartender App (iPad), and now we have Android, and a sexy Webapp called NightGraph :)

Financial Social Media: What if you could be able to see your Local Government expenses with good UX? or from your favorite Non-Profit? This is still in “we-need-to-figure-it-out-how-to-make-it-scale” but we’ve launched an MVP Glass Social. Imagine bringing Fuerza Mexico donations, and being able to track all that money from and for the earthquake? Full-on Social Transparency.

Crypto Aggregation: What if you bring BTC and ETC into “Mexican” Mint? We are bringing Coinbase, Gemini, and Bitso into Glass; many things will come around this in 2018.

Local-e Thank you for everything!Local-e is a User Generated Content we launched (Mili, etc), and this year we decided to put it on hold, due to challenges of scale, profitability, and mainly focus. Miss you guys <3

100k+ FB Organic Growth: Even though we put it on hold, and shut down Local-e it was an amazing ride, Mili our Growth Leader managed to bring this to another level.

Focus on making clear what parts of your day are within your control, what can you influence vs.the ones you can’t, you not only will be happier, but you will put yourself over the people who fight the unwinnable battle.

Is your product development process creating more problems than it’s solving?

Product Development Process: I’ve been in all types of startups from where there’s no product development process at all, to a startup that established a programming military machine as their go-to product process, and a startup where I implemented a product development process myself.

When product becomes a military procedure.

Something interesting is that each startup, each team, and each product is a new world. Even though each of them operates differently, there’s always something that joins them: The Process. Because even if you have no established process, at the end it’s ad hoc process or an on-demand one.

Building a product is a cross-functional endeavor, as PMs we must deal with everything and everyone, we are the ajonjolí de todos los moles.

The Product’s outcome is on the product manager, in other words, the product manager is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a product, and I say no one and everyone, because, we PMs don’t have any authority over any of the people involved in the collective effort.

So we are no one’s boss, but at the end, if the product fails, it’s our responsibility; sounds like a Catch 22 to me. That’s why the Product Manager should always have a card up their sleeve: Process.

Process, in my point of view should be established into three areas:

Communication;

Autonomy; and

Execution.

Let me explain with an example; many startups and product teams have adopted Objective and Key Results (“OKRs”): please read my article about OKRs if you don’t know what they are, and also so you can establish better NYE resolutions.

OKRs, are a great example of a process that establishes Communication, Autonomy, and Execution.

Let’s say a company’s main Goal aka Objective is to increase brand awareness, that would require a couple of key results; maybe improving the landing page, adding a product tour, increasing the signup funnel by xyz%, and so on.

What’s interesting about this example, is that you are i) communicating at the company or team level the main objective; but you leave ii) autonomy to the team of how to solve this, and how such iii) execution will be measured.

So any process, should follow such schema, unless you are reading this in Fort Bragg and you want to apply it with your squad, be my guest but demanding is not the same as communicating.

So moving back to Product Development Process, how do we establish certainty, replace chaos with order, in a such a fast changing world? Maybe a process that solved yesterday’s problems could block a team from developing tomorrow’s solutions.

To answer that, let’s begin with my dad used to tell me:

“Maybe you have no idea what do you want to do, but hell you know what you really don’t”

And damn he is right, we will focus another post on the how to establish a process, but let’s first check, what your process should not do to your team:

No No No Process Warnings

1.- It takes twice the planning & execution of the process, than the actual execution of the Product.

Sometimes it’s easy to underestimate the time and cost of executing a process with the product & Dev team. If the managers are asking for 1 Pagers, user flows, lowframes, high frames, wireframes, Mocks, PRD (product requirement doc), Postmortems, Sprint Planning, Mid-Sprint Review, costing, burn-down charts post this and that. You could get lost more on the planning and reviewing than actually executing the product.

2. The cost Opportunity between process and customer validation

All product managers have the same 24 hours, and it’s up to the best PM’s using their time talking to the customer rather than going through a bureaucratic development process.

Product is King, but the User is the King of Kings, and if the product development process is not centered towards her you are just wasting yours team’s time.

3. Making a process non-iterative one

The life-cycle of product is dependent on its iterations, new incoming variables, and in & out factors, and that’s how the Product process should be.

We must always allow the process to murmurate in a constant flow ?

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5 Books that defined me in 2016, and make my 2017 better

TOP 5 BOOKS THAT MAKE YOUR 2017 BETTER.

*An old post that I left as a draft that I thought I should just publish it.

In 2016 I read 16 books, I’m already starting to read another one so probably will be 17 books in total for 2016. Reading for me is not about entertainment, but educating myself for a greater future.

At the beginning of the year when I wrote my OKRs (aka my late NYE Resolutions were written in February btw.) I put myself the goal of reading 2 books per month, that was out of my league for 2016. I didn’t read as fast as I can today, I had to practice almost one year to read faster, but retain as much as I can.

This book challenges you; makes you feel small, lazy and doesn’t matter what you do, you can do more and be better.

Elon Musk Quest for a Fantastic Future is an open window to understand the mind, and life of the real Tony Stark. Musk’s mind works in a different way from politics and power to technology and product, and this books gives you a glimpse of that and more.

***Why should I read it? *** It doesn’t matter if you are not in technology, entrepreneurship or the Startup World. Reading this will give you an understanding of how the future will be defined thanks to Musk and it will give you an external framework of how Musk’s mindset works towards everything he do.

“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.” — Sir Elon Musk

There are two behavioural psychologists I admire the most, and both of them are my namesakes; Daniel Kahneman Nobel price in Economic Science, and Daniel Ariely MIT professor with 20 years of researching behavioral economics.

2014–2015 I immersed myself in behavioural economics until 2016when I ran into Ariely’s work. Ariely has found that people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Basically, we suck at making decisions.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational, and this book explains why, and how the brain tricks you to make stupid decisions.

Why should I read it? If you are a product manager, or work on sales or marketing, in fact any type of business, this book will help you to understand from how to do pricing, to how to frame things in a better way for your customers for better conversion rates.

Besides that, it will teach you to understand yourself better, why you do certain things at certain times, from being a father to purchasing something on amazon to procrastination.

We make decisions as a function of the environment that we’re in. Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.

Man this book is fun! And amazingly entertaining! In Spanish we have a expression that says “Cuando veas tu vecino las barbas cortar, pon las tuyas remojar” aka when you see your neighbor’s beard cut, put yours to soak.

At the beginning of the post, I stated I read for education, not entertainment, but Dan Lyons managed to accomplish both.

Why should I read it? If you work at different startups as I do; Disrupted will teach you what NOT to do, and also bring you back to reality, I mean how the startup life can stupidly irrationally compared to the way my parents used to work. It will also give a sense of how the system works between VCs, shitty product, with a high valuation.

“You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore…It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”

Angela gives you an outstanding framework for looking your life, business or any project in a different way. The book could have been shorter and it was a little bit repetitive, but worth the extraction//scanning reading.

Why should I read it? The never ending cliché, Talent vs HardWork, and every knows hard work always wins! But how do you establish a good process and framework to continue quality work? How do you keep yourself inspired? I think Angela gives you anecdotes, stories, for you to create your own inspiration, and own grit.

It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things

Before as PM, and now as Head of Product forecasting is tough, a mix between science and art. How do you manage incoming data, new variables and events, and keeping the roadmap clean and healthy? This is what inspired me to read this book.

Why should I read it? Tobe honest it is a thick, dense book, and it won’t teach you “how to predict”. Nate Silver focuses on giving the correct mindset towards forecasting and predictive analytics. It will help you to develop intuition for the kinds of predictions that are possible, that are not so possible, where they may go wrong, and how to avoid some common pitfalls.

“The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth”

Why should I read it? I recommend you to read this, not for following each of the steps because almost everything was written before the digital era, but it will help you to create your own sense of GTD technique that applies to your own needs.

Mine ended up being Toggle + Trello.

“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”

I’ve been a Trello user for at least 4 years, it wasn’t until 2016 that I start using it with a purpose. I’m basically running my life on it, this is how I manage my todo’s on the different projects I’m working on.

How I use it: I use a mix between GTD, and Agile Methodology, I’ll create post about this someday.

If you want to improve something, measure it. I use Toggl for tracking every corner of my life.

Toggl is also an app that I probably signed up on 2014, their system glitch a bit and had some minor bugs, but they optimize their timer and dashboard and now is amazing.

You can add Toggl into almost any app, so you can start tracking your time. If you never heard of Toggl, they make super cool Infographics and challenges you on how to run a startup unicorn.

How I use it: I added a Chrome plugin directly to Trello so I start timing the task, and then I just see all my tracking times on my Dashboard. Sometimes I get nerdy enough to track how it took me to grab a coffee, and I use the iOS app for that.

Even though Slack is awesome, email is like a cockroach, it will never die. It was invented in 1960’s and it hasn’t been until 2016 (Mailbox did a very good job, but it shut down) that someone made a decent Mail app, that actually makes you more productive.

Polymail has a clean UI, very intuitive, I was an early adopter, and the bug fixing patience was worth it.

They have iOS and Desktop app, which allows you to send later (as boomerang), who read your email feature, email lists, re-schedule, activity feed, multiple inboxes in case you have different email accounts, Contact Information, which it tells you all the emails that contact has sent to you, and also the attachments.

2017 will be an interesting year for emailing, there is already amazing products aiming to fix that, like Hop a Chat email or Notion AI, which brings AI and Machine learning to emails.

Alfred is like your Mac Spotlight on steroids; it allows you to search everything inside your computer and outside your computer, such places like Amazon. For example, you can search if a domain is available, search on Github, send your mac to sleep and basically automate everything on your mac.

You can add workflows and bring third party apps into Alfred, like Open a Slack Channel directly from Alfred, or a specific repo on Github. The “workflows” has a price, but productivity always comes with a price.

I used to LOVE Evernote, it was my default note taker, their MVP was useful. They just to focused on one thing only: A simple taking notes application.

Evernote is a mess, their UI is complicated, it has way to many features, as consequence it complicates a simple task: taking notes.

Due to above, Alternote was invented, a beautiful app that has clean UI, for taking notes, it allows you to have a “Distraction Free” mode which is only a white or black pages, and boom you get yourself writing.

Funny fact: Alternote uses Evernote backend system for syncing the notes. I never paid for Evernote, but without hesitation I bought Alternote, even though they depend 100% entirely on what’s happening on Evernote.

They way it works is, that if you already have an Evernote account the notebooks and notes will sync and appear on Alternote the moment you log in with your Evernote details on Alternote.

How I use it: Alternote is my day by day taking note app, if I’m in a meeting I pull Alternote, open the notebook and start writing, as simple as that, I use to write my blogs on Alternote until I moved to something more specific for my blogging.

The more you write, more demanding it becomes the organization of the stuff you are writing.

I ran into Bear as upvoted on Product Hunt and then also feature on the App Store. Bear is amazingly beautiful, the main feature that I love is the way you can organize your things through hashtags, and sub-hashtags, and automatically in organize’s them, doesn’t matter if you added the “#” sign it will show up on the sidebar.

How I use it: I started to write a book a couple of months ago, just about when I found Bear, bear allows me to keep things perfectly organize. I would add notes and ideas and random resources on Alternote, but the writing, the getting into Flow of writing would be on Bear.

iA Writer is a very simple writing app, it’s been around for quite a few years, but they added some new features, and I decided to give it a try.

This is now my go-to app for writing any blog posts, all the styling is through markdown which I love. Also, it allows you to have distraction free and night mode like Alternote, but the main features I love is: Focus Mode.

iA Writer brings the sentence which I’m writing just in the middle of the screen, and the rest gets ignored by lowering the font opacity.

The moment you add a “.”, you close the paragraph, and boom you are reading only the sentence you are writing and that’s a sweet feature

The other feature I love is the “Preview Bar”. What happens sometimes with Evernote, Alternote or any other writing app is when adding images to them it takes sometime to load them or rendered them, and it’s time-consuming.

iA Writer what it does it allows you keep everything on Markdown, and then preview it in “real time”, as if you were compiling and then executing the program.

How I use it: This is now my main writing blog app, I can export direct from iA Writer to Medium or WP and start editing over there. I still don’t know if writing the book will be better here than Bear, but time will define that.

The main difference between Grammarly, is that Grammarly focuses on (at least free version) reviewing only the spelling, and wording, not in a macro writing sense. Whereas Hemingway helps you with the structure of your writing, either by the way your paragraphs are written, how hard is to read your sentences etc.

This amazing app (hard though of sticking of the habit) is your go-to journal. I love the clean design, super neat UI.

I paid for both the Destkop and iOS app. I started with the desktop app and then I tried the iOS app, and to be honest both of them are amazing. The user case is different between app and desktop. Desktop is getting deep with what happen on your day, writing long paragraphs and the things you felt during that event, and the iOS is more for logging something on the go, that moment, what you felt at that particularly moment.

The main feature I love is that the app pulls data from other apps and you can just log something about whatever happen in that moment.

When I really need to focus and get in the “flow” I use Brain.Fm. Brain.Fm is an AI composer, yes all the music is composed and produced by an IA built by the BFM team.

I haven’t upgraded to their premium version. Without paying you can have up to 10 sessions. Each session can last from 30 minutes to 20 hours, and is amazing, is like white noise but with super powers.

You are on your way home. You feel tired, you open your iPhone to see Facebook and then boom you can’t sleep. What happens is that the blue colors of your devices either your smartphone or your computer are telling your brain, be awake! Is not sunrise, is not time to sleep. What flux does is that mimics your screen colors with the sunlight hours, so your screen is actually sunrising.

This helps you a lot to keep working but not making your eyes get to tired. You must also keep the recommended colors, giving it too much red makes me a little bit sleepy and dizzy.

Your life dashboard. You can see the complete story of your life in one app. Crazy right? Gyroscope app is made with React Native, I ran into this amazing app by their blogpost explaining the challenges they run into creating such a beautiful app.

The feature I love hate, is the year count, I’m at the moment of writing this blogpost I’m 26.494540919 years old and counting.

Ifyou know me well, you know I always try to find the perfect tool for the perfect task. The way I see life, you must doubt default options, and that’s how I like to run my life. Rejecting default things in my life. I always wonder if there’s is a better way to do this, or do that. For example, who likes Internet Explorer (windows), or Safari (apple) anyway? Accepting what was pre-installed in your life, it means you accept the default options which were handed to you.

One day, I was HATING on the default Apple calendar; and I asked:. “I wonder if there’s a better calendar app out there”, that’s the moment I found Sunrise App, and fell in love with it. It was shut down yesterday — (almost a month ago).

From Sunrise to Dawn.

Sunrise has been the best calendar ever. Doesn’t matter if you use iCloud cal, Gmail, outlook, it will sort out your day like a good cup of tea at the end of a long day. The main two reasons why I believe Sunrise was the best calendar are:

1) Backend

2) User Experience

BCKND

Let’s go back-end of 2012, when Sunrise launched the initial version at the Apple Store. The Sunrise Team did something different compared to the existing calendar apps at that time. Instead of relying on the native iOS APIs and letting iOS handle the calendar syncing part, they decided to reject the default engine, and chose to handle it. This means when you connected your Google Account, Sunrise’s servers would be handling the event creation. This allowed them to differentiate themselves from the competition, and gave them the opportunity to bring in more features later down the road.

You Eye You Ex

The Sunrise team just nailed it with the user experience. Instead of moving from day to month to year like today on iOS calendar, everything can be seen in one swipe. Everything is scrollable into a month view, and with just one touch you can see the event, the directions, or even the hangout link to jump into the meeting.

I hope someone will come out to “llenar este espacio” aka fill the space, with an amazing calendar app with a breezy UX and outstanding syncing backend for keeping your day tidy and well organized.

Meanwhile, I invite you to check the sunrise alternative apps from Product Hunt:

I remember when I was in business class and my professor said: “Cash is King”. This meant good cash flow and very good financial health inside a company.

I've been in product development for a couple of years now and I’ve seen startups that leverage large sums of money without a product market fit. Products that you like but not understanding them well enough to love them. In today’s world, we base success on the stupid idea of cash. A Pinterest-like office full of macs, injecting money for customer validation is the dumbest thing you can do. As we can see "Cash" is just a means to an end, because in reality: The Product is King…

The Product is King because a great product is created by an amazing team, based on outstanding customer insight, clear data understanding, and yes sometimes luck along the way.

It is King because it must have a good adaptation c̶a̶s̶h̶ flow, it must be healthy, enduring and be ready for change to come;

Product is the realm where things actually happen because it is built to focus on just one thing, to bring a solution to an existing problem.

The hardest thing is getting your product to work on a global scale; marketing, sales, and money will come in their own time if the product excels. We should create a dependable commodity product, something that people love so much. Something that people cannot live without.

(Bye, bye Sunrise Calendar…😪 )

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A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to join Payclip, an early stage Fintech startup, as a Product Manager. From the beginning I was excited to join them. I met the founders two years ago at a Tech conference and I knew about the amazing things they were doing in the Mexican market using technology and culture from the Bay Area. (Yes, I know, dream come true.)

Starting at Payclip

When I started, I had one main goal: to join and be part of the team.Why? I knew that most of the engineers and the designers would be in the Bay Area or the Utah office, meaning that I would be the middleman between the MX office and them. For me, it was mandatory for them to know that I was here to help, eliminate obstacles, and improve communication between MX and the engineering team.

On my first day, Vilash our CTO called me from the SF office, and said: “Daniel, I want your first goal to be: To Evangelize the Product Management”. The MX office already had a Project Manager, and they were confused about what a Product Manager would do.

So in my first week I established three goals:

1) Introduce myself to the OPS team. The true stakeholders for the user stories and requirements. I also needed to understand the whole company workflow, the OPS executive’s commonplaces, and to understand the CEO’s strategy for Clip;

2) Evangelize PM to them. The OPS team didn’t know what Product Management was. There was a Project Manager and people might have thought there would be some invasion of duties; and

3) Introduce myself to the Engineering and Product team. I wanted them to trust me and to know that I was there to help. As the middleman between Mexico and the US office, I would channel things in the best way.

The way I managed to achieve my three goals with the OPS so fast was very simple. I encouraged them to talk about their work (everybody enjoys talking about their own work) and I just aroused this desire in each of them.

So basically, I approached the UX designers, the awesome developers, and the rest of the OPS team and told them “Hey, I joined yesterday as a PM, but to be honest I think you can teach me more about what you have achieved and what challenges you have overcome.” Then they showed me everything they had built, designed and done at Payclip. The talented team I was joining amazed me. I finished every meeting, highlighting everything that astonished me about their work, and said: “OK, how can I help you to make your life easier?”

I believe there is no better motivator than praising the amazing work of your team members. Everybody wants recognition and a sense of belonging.

What about Evangelizing Product Management?

Ok. So they were excited to work with me, but what happened with Evangelizing the Product Management? Well, I invented a story to explain to the Ops team what I was there for:

“So imagine you are a doctor, your day by day is crazy. You can hear sirens from far away, getting louder and louder every second. You know things will get complicated. Firstly, you don’t have any idea how to operate and react because every time a patient enters it could be something different; secondly, you know you must always be trying to give the best possible service and treatment to each patient; and finally you may feel like you are wearing blinkers because you’re focusing on the immediate future and whatever that siren will bring you, rather than looking at the bigger picture.”

“Due to the above, you hire me. You tell me you need a new product. A new scanner that will fix this and that, but you also need software for better patient management. The list continues. Building something requires time, so I asked myself: are the doctors needs equivalent to the patient’s ones? So, this is what I’m here for. To create a balance between how the doctor will operate within the hospital and the number and type patients he receives; in order for the finished product to give the best possible user experience. To help you to build a product that creates a smoother ‘operation’ here in Clip whilst being based on the ‘patients’ out there using Clip.”

I hope that one day Mexican companies will have an outstanding working culture like Clip has built from the ground up. It is amazing being part of this awesome team.

And the following quote is maybe the reason why the Ops team doesn’t love the product mindset :)

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

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January is over, it’s been more than 30 days since most people started writing their NYE resolutions. Time is passing by and the reality is that by the end of the year only 8% of people will actually achieve their NYE resolutions.

Before the year begins, we get all excited and start writing all the great things we want to accomplish this year, but this is vomiting ideas out. A big applause for motivation and excitement but execution is everything. However, it’s never too late to start doing your resolutions for this year.

It will take time and patience to build up a habit of learning and developing a new skill. Charles Duhigg in his book: The Power of Habit states that the brain is always looking for ways to save effort. That’s why our brain doesn’t work like in The Matrix where you input a skill you want to learn at the beginning of the year and then you’ll learn it.

So let’s say for this 2016 goals we want to Wake up Earlier, Lose Weight and Learn something new. We are talking about three habits and one habit becoming a skill. Because before you start learning to code every day or learning to dance salsa, you must first create the habit of making time, right?

So to make becoming the next 80-year-old salsa dancer a reality. We must establish a little bit of structure to accomplish our goals, measure them, and if we like them then continue to develop them.

To overcome this structure of how our brain is wired, I suggest that you establish Objective and Key Results (“OKRs”) as your personal life metric for creating better habits and new developing skills.

What are OKRs?

Objectives and Key Results is a popular technique that was implemented at Google in 1999 by John Doerr and they been using it ever since. Basically, it is a method of defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.

You can found out more by watching Rick Klau explaining how Google Sets Goals:

https://youtu.be/mJB83EZtAjc

It’s pretty fascinating how this system has helped Google operate in an ambitious and measurable way. So we are bringing this easy-to-follow structure to our daily lives.

So first, you set up an Objective; it should be ambitious and take you out of your comfort zone.

Then you set up a number of “Key Results” these must be measurable, in other words, they are quantifiable and should be graded between 0 and 10, something simple to grade. The “sweet spot” according to Rick Klau, is between 6–7, and I also encourage that spot. If someone gets a 10, it means it was way too easy, not ambitious enough, and probably well within your comfort zone. Low grades should be analyzed to help you reassess the next OKRs. Low grades should make you ask: Is it worth doing? Do I actually feel passionate to develop this skill? What can I do differently to reach my objective?

And lastly, OKRs are public. This is very important; posting your OKRs will help you to have public commitment and support from your friends.

Richard Newton

Let’s use an example to give you an idea (in fact this will start to be my public OKR). I suggest that you should make your OKRs quarterly; this will help you to keep motivated. We should see them as small goal chunks, instead of the whole year resolutions.

Daniel Yubi’s OKRs:

1.- Join a Gym and attend 5 times a week, with a 60-minute session as the minimum.

2.- Meditate 15 minutes before 7 am in the morning during weekdays.

3.- Read 1 book every fortnight.

4.- Eat 5 lean meals a day.

5.- Learn the basics of coding and launch my own website.

Basically, my objective says that I want to be healthy in different areas of my life with the purpose to keep growing as a person.

This year’s quarter has already started, so I will have less time to do my OKR. So I commit myself working on this until March 31st, just when Q1–2016 finishes. Then I will grade myself and do my average of Key Results to see my Objective Grade.

When I finish grading the Q1, then I will start planning my OKRs for Q2. I can focus on the same Objective, but pivot to new Key Results (e.g. could family be something I want to involve now? ); any new Key Result should lead to objective grading in Q2.

If I have low grades i.e 3–4, I must ask myself why I didn’t deliver. What obstacles or external variables interfered, and can I eliminate them? These variables could be: a lot of work, you had an accident, or maybe you had more quality family time; so that’s good, you could pivot to that KR.

I want to suggest that you try this approach. It will help you to have a bigger vision, but making steps towards your objective. It also more rewarding to accomplish something in 3 months, and make new Goals rather than making 1 year goals. The best thing is that at the end of the year, you can take your annual average from your 4 OKRs, and really see how it went this year!

You will have a documented system of the progress of your life’s goals. You didn’t like them? Analyze, get some self-insight and just change them for the next quarter. This is about learning about you, and to assimilate what’s the best approach to keep growing into what you want to be.

I will leave you some basic notes from John Doerr’s Deck for OKRs:

Maximum 5 objectives with 4 Key Results

60% -70% Grade -> Good

40% > 0 — = Bad

Continue incomplete Key Results ONLY if they are still important.

Now to you

So, are you ready to write your first Life OKRs?

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